A curse of knowledge or a curse of uncertainty? Bilingualism, embodiment, and egocentric bias

Abstract

The ability to adopt others’ perspectives—our “Theory of Mind”—underpins social interaction. Nevertheless, adults are imperfect perspective takers, demonstrating egocentric biases. Here, a series of experiments assessed whether (1) embodying an agent’s physical perspective (working out whether he held something in his left or right hand) or (2) being bilingual, would benefit perspective taking. Participants were shown a scenario in which an agent puts a ball in one of four boxes. When he returns later, the boxes have been rearranged. Participants, who additionally know that the ball is now in a different box, then judge how likely the agent is to look for the ball in each of the four boxes first. In Experiments 1–3 participants were not more likely to judge the agent would look where he last saw it as a function of either factor. In Experiments 4 and 5, one group of participants were told where the ball had been moved to, the other only that the ball had been moved to a different box. In Experiment 4, participants in the latter condition assigned higher probability to the boxes that were never mentioned. In Experiment 5 this was replicated and was driven by monolinguals and those who had received the embodiment condition. These results suggest that egocentric biases may be more likely to arise when participants are more deliberative, such as when making a judgement under uncertainty, and that extrinsic factors such as bilingualism and embodiment may influence perspective attributions under such conditions.